Christopher Kulendran Thomas, When Platitudes Become Form. Courtesy the artist and Mercer Union
Christopher Kulendran Thomas
When Platitudes Become Form
6 September – 12 October 2013
at Mercer Union, Toronto
Through his ongoing enterprise When Platitudes Become Form Christopher Kulendran Thomas reconfigures artworks by some of Sri Lanka’s most celebrated young artists purchased through the new contemporary art gallery scene in Colombo. The dislocation of artworks from one context to another, rather than operating as a seamless transition, is problematised by Thomas who mobilises current aesthetic tropes to translate contemporary art’s mimetic forms from the West. Contemporary art rather than universal becomes a language as material form translated from one context to another.
The recent rise of the contemporary art market in Sri Lanka both reflects and affirms the country’s postwar economic liberalisation following the genocidal assault on the Tamil minority in the East and North of the island in 2009. Born in London in 1979 after his parents left escalating civil conflict in Sri Lanka, Thomas exploits the gap between contemporary art from here and there, setting in motion consequences that undercut the parameters of both. Asymmetric structures are aligned with asymmetric markets to exploit the difference. Taking as material the whole system by which contemporary art is distributed, Thomas reconfigures artworks in order to instigate part-clandestine processes of structural change in the formerly Tamil-occupied territories of the North and to form a media platform to link diasporically dispersed Tamil solidarity.
Cultural exchange is explicitly perverted by the underlying colonial trading patterns that it usually masks. Art is acknowledged as ecologically contingent within its networked reality. Counter-manipulating imperial interdependencies of art and war, a conspiracy of consequences is set in motion that extends beyond the work’s as yet visible horizons.
– Georgina Jackson, Director of Exhibitions & Publications
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Christopher Kulendran Thomas, When Platitudes Become Form. Courtesy the artist and Mercer Union